Custom Raw Port/Port 9100 is supported , which is good, but since PCL and Postscript are not supported, chances do not look good .

Your best bet is finding a printer driver for another protocol-compatible Brother printer that is supported with a driver under Windows 98 .

Sources :
https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=u … 2700dw_us_eu_as
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/information … rinters-brother

You can try the Dlink LPR client and then point your 9x machine to a LPD print server.

darry wrote on 2020-04-21, 00:16:

Your best bet is finding a printer driver for another protocol-compatible Brother printer that is supported with a driver under Windows 98 .

How can I find which printer protocols my machine is compatible with?
I read online something about Laserjet III but that didn't work.
ACtually, at the moment, the machine cannot seem to find the printer at the IP address, even though I can ping to it.
I have no apparent way to make the printer join the workgroup to be able to browse to it and/or use its network name.

DosFreak wrote on 2020-04-21, 00:53:

You can try the Dlink LPR client and then point your 9x machine to a LPD print server.

What would happen if I share my printer from my main PC (Windows 7)? Would that conflict with it being on its own IP address already?
I mean it would obviously be much better to have it working on its own and directly, but if this is a workaround , it's not bad.

You can share it out from a server using the standard Window sprinter sharing but your client machine would still need to know how to connect to it. On Windows servers you would assign the 32bit and 64bit drivers to the shared printer so when the client connects it would download the drivers. Since there are no 9x drivers then this wouldn't work.

Your printer just does not support the PCL print protocols that would allow it to be compatible with any Laserjet printer or any Postscript compatible printer. Sharing the printer from a suported OS would still require a compatible printer driver on the Windows 9x side, so it would not help .

Your best bet is probably to try printer drivers for the most recent Brother printers that do still have Windows 9x or ME printer drivers on the Internet, prererably from Brother's site . However, you may not succeed as there may not exist a compatible driver .

To reiterate, printing to a network printer from Windows 9x is still possible with modern printers if the printer supports PCL or PostScript because you can then use a driver for a printer that supports one of those protocols. Otherwise, you need a driver that supports whatever GDI-based proprietary protocol does support and such a driver may not exist .

Your best bet might be to install print-to-pdf software on Windows 98 and then save to a shared folder on the Win7 machine, and then actually print the file from there.
Surprisingly it seems like there isn't software you could run on Win7 that pretends to be a PostScript printer and then prints using the Win7 drivers.

Actually, it seems you might be able to use GhostScript to create a virtual PostScript printer on your Win7 machine that you could then talk to from Win98 but I'm having difficulty finding a clear guide.

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-21, 13:38:

Surprisingly it seems like there isn't software you could run on Win7 that pretends to be a PostScript printer and then prints using the Win7 drivers.

Maybe this could be adapted to do so .

http://pnm2ppa.sourceforge.net/PPA_networking … tworking-4.html

Hmm. I used to have a Brother laser printer with PCL and Epson impact emulation, along with a parallel port. Think it was made around '07, so old but not ancient. That's the kind of printer you want - a printer that does not rely on drivers, Winprinters as we used to call them, but that talks bare metal between the printing host computer and a circuit board capable of managing the whole printing job.
Such a printer will do graphics with anything that can speak PCL or dot matrix Epson or IBM; Windows 95, an old Amiga, even an Apple II running Bannermania or Print Shop. No headaches, just print and go. That's because they again have all the electronics and computer software needed to handle a print job built in and can talk directly to a computer over the parallel port and independently process several languages of raw printer commands supported going back to the early 80s and still usually offered as a fallback.

radiounix wrote on 2020-04-21, 14:06:

Hmm. I used to have a Brother laser printer with PCL and Epson impact emulation, along with a parallel port. Think it was made around '07, so old but not ancient. That's the kind of printer you want - a printer that does not rely on drivers, Winprinters as we used to call them, but that talks bare metal between the printing host computer and a circuit board capable of managing the whole printing job.
Such a printer will do graphics with anything that can speak PCL or dot matrix Epson or IBM; Windows 95, an old Amiga, even an Apple II running Bannermania or Print Shop. No headaches, just print and go. That's because they again have all the electronics and computer software needed to handle a print job built in and can talk directly to a computer over the parallel port and independently process several languages of raw printer commands supported going back to the early 80s and still usually offered as a fallback.

Modern, mainly office-type, printers that you can buy today still support PCL and/or PostScript, but they cost more . Case in point, he Brother
DCP-L2540DW/HL-L2380DW/MFC-L2720DW/MFC-L2740DW share most of the same spec sheet as the OP's printer, but support PCL and PostScript .

You could always set up a pdf or xps printer and then transfer the pdf or xps to a network share and have the computer that has the printer installed monitor the folder you put those files in and automatically print files when they arrive in that folder.

You could even always have the file printed to a specific monitored folder on the 98 machine and then have 98 automatically transfer that file to the other computer.

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-21, 13:38:

Your best bet might be to install print-to-pdf software on Windows 98 and then save to a shared folder on the Win7 machine, and then actually print the file from there.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-21, 15:20:

You could always set up a pdf or xps printer and then transfer the pdf or xps to a network share and have the computer that has the printer installed monitor the folder you put those files in and automatically print files when they arrive in that folder.

The main reason I wanted to do this was to print from DOS software too (old Banenrmania), not sure if a print-to-PDF device would work in this way. If it does, it's a decent enough workaround, I guess.
So which software will print to PDF on Windows 98? I have such software but on Windows 7 or XP. Any recommendations? Is there a Microsoft XPS driver like Windows has? CutePDF Writer does not work on 9x.

I'm annoyed my printer won't support Postscript, but I never looked or cared about this feature when I got it. Only now it occurred to me that it might work, but I see why it doesn't. What a shame!
Thanks everyone for your help so far, this issue has been quite educational and an eye-opener.

PDFCreator-2_1_2-setup.exe or older should work for 98+

For DOS you can see if the program supports saving to file or redirecting the output to a file.

Thanks for the pointer to that particular program, I'll look it up.

DosFreak wrote on 2020-04-21, 18:17:

For DOS you can see if the program supports saving to file or redirecting the output to a file.

Well supposedly Windows 98 can capture DOS print output if you run it within Windows, and direct it to a Windows printer. I never tried it, but this was an option I was hoping to use.

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-21, 13:46:

Actually, it seems you might be able to use GhostScript to create a virtual PostScript printer on your Win7 machine that you could then talk to from Win98 but I'm having difficulty finding a clear guide.

THIS. You can use also a small Linux-box, maybe even a Raspberry Pi or something as an intermediary between the printer and an older computer. The Linux box would sport an actual driver and then advertise the printer to the Windows boxes as a generic PostScript-compatible machine. The beauty of having this on a network is that no direct connection with the hardware would even be required. I had a tiny matchbox sized PC do print-server tasks at one time to enable AirPrint (printing for iPhones and iPads) for a printer that was supposedly not compatible. It was re-sharing a printer on the same network with the required extensions to support more clients than the printer itself was able to do.

I found this software called pdf995 that alleges Windows 9x compatibility, yet the installer says it "expects a newer version of Windows".
I cannot find PDFCreator, not that old version, not for free. Any suggestions?
Anybody ever used pdf995? Maybe an old version will do...

leonardo wrote on 2020-04-21, 19:28:

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-21, 13:46:

Actually, it seems you might be able to use GhostScript to create a virtual PostScript printer on your Win7 machine that you could then talk to from Win98 but I'm having difficulty finding a clear guide.

THIS. You can use also a small Linux-box, maybe even a Raspberry Pi or something as an intermediary between the printer and an older computer. The Linux box would sport an actual driver and then advertise the printer to the Windows boxes as a generic PostScript-compatible machine. The beauty of having this on a network is that no direct connection with the hardware would even be required. I had a tiny matchbox sized PC do print-server tasks at one time to enable AirPrint (printing for iPhones and iPads) for a printer that was supposedly not compatible. It was re-sharing a printer on the same network with the required extensions to support more clients than the printer itself was able to do.

This sounds interesting but a bit overkill for what I wanna do. i'm leaning towards having another usually on computer as a printer share, but Windows 7 does not seem to work with Windows 95.

I also tried sharing a PDF printer on the Windows 7 machine. Nothing. it just cannot find the network resource. I am guessing incompatibilities between networking between these two systems.

There are registry settings that need to be changed on the Windows 7 side to enable Windows 98 SE 's older and less secure version of SMB .

Here is an article about doing it in Windows 10, Windows 7 should be easier.

http://kishy.ca/?p=1511

darry wrote on 2020-04-21, 21:01:

There are registry settings that need to be changed on the Windows 7 side to enable Windows 98 SE 's older and less secure version of SMB .

In any case, I just dusted off an XP machine, which doesn't need that hack, and even though I managed to get a connection to the shared printer, the same problems occur, since even if I can share a printer from the newer machine, Windows 9x requires drivers to work with it too, drivers that I don't have. I tried several PS drivers from HP and Xerox, and neither worked. Not even the Generic driver for text only worked.
The only solution is what others have proposed: to create an intermediary Ghostcript server that will deal with this.
Option #2 is a PDF printer driver for Windows 9x, but as I mentioned before, so far, I haven't found any. pdf995 doesn't even want to install in Windows XP, what a sham.

Hmm you could not network print from XP even though there are drivers for XP ? That does not sound good. Are you sure your router is not part of the issue ? Possibly blocking some ports.. Just a thought as I do see Xp32 and XP 64 drivers for your printer which should allow network printing if configured properly.